Founders Feature #048 - RECOVAR

Digitising E-Waste Recovery

Apr 17, 2022

Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.

For this week's edition, I interviewed Henry Purchase, Co-founder of RECOVAR, a SaaS tool for electronic waste recovery and inspection based in the UK.

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Here’s what RECOVAR is all about:

🏠 The Basics

The Problem:

Currently, only 17.4% of electronic waste is documented, i.e. properly collected and recycled. The existing process for e-waste removal and collection is extremely manual and fragmented, running through excel sheets, manual logging, and paper trails. Companies are incentivised to dispose of their e-waste appropriately, but since there is little governance governance or official tracking, a lot of the reported numbers aren’t actually correct.

The Solution:

We digitise the collection process for e-waste collectors, providing a standardised audit trail and chain of custody. We offer an all-in-one asset recovery software to simplify the entire e-waste recovery process and make it cheaper and more transparent.

The Team:

We’re a team of three co-founders, myself, Matt, and Louis. Matt took part in the Alacrity Foundation the year before me. Louis did a degree in computational neuroscience, cognition, and AI, and he is one of the smartest people I know. As for me, I did a degree in civil engineering and worked in an engineering consultancy for a year. I also run a social media marketing agency called Social 90.

🚀 The Journey

How did you come up with your startup/solution?

I joined a programme called the Alacrity Foundation based in South Wales, which is an innovation charity supported by the Welsh and UK governments. Alacrity aims to turn recent graduates into tech entrepreneurs, by providing practical business training, software skills, and mentoring to start their own businesses and meet co-founders. As part of that programme, we went out and spoke to 40-50 different people in different companies to identify a problem, and this is how we came across the problems in the digital waste recovery market.

The way e-waste is currently processed is a huge problem, which we wanted to address. We’re starting with the telecoms industry and hoping to expand into other industries and countries in the future.

Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?

The telecoms space is particularly interesting to us right now, because there are a lot of changes happening in this industry at the moment. For example, in the UK, the PSTN has been switched off, meaning that almost all copper lines will have to be disposed of and gradually removed. This material will hopefully be reused in developing countries, but the removal process will be difficult to manage. Our goal is for RECOVAR to play a role in this, and remove the burden of having to deal with paper and excel!

What is a recent success you are proud of?

We launched our pilot this month, which is a big success for us. It means that RECOVAR’s product is now ready to be tested and get live user feedback from companies in the industry. Going from zero to now having a dashboard and web app to download is incredibly exciting, especially thinking of the value we will be able to provide.

What is a recent challenge you have faced?

A challenge we struggle with is bootstrapping the business because you have to be so resourceful. You’re on your own in a way, because you don’t have investors you can easily jump on a call with to ask for advice. We got offered 250k seed funding at the start of this year, but we eventually decided against it as it didn’t fit the team’s long term goals. Working toward that first revenue-generating customer is a challenge as we need to be resourceful. Once you have that first customer, the next will come though and the snowball effect will set in due to the value we will provide.

What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?

I would have done everything faster. For anyone looking to get a product out there and build a tech startup, I would say challenge yourself to get something out there in three months. No matter how basic it is, get something functional out there that can provide early value. Providing value doesn’t have to look pretty, but it’ll allow you to start gathering feedback.

🧠 The Lessons

What is the best advice you have been given recently?

Only do stuff that only you can do.

Within a team, you have got to trust that each person is working to the best of their ability. In the sense of working smarter and not harder, you really need to consider the key things that only you can do and focus on those while outsourcing the things that someone else can do too. It maximises efficiency and output.

What advice would you give to other young founders?

If you’re considering founding something, just do it and don’t be surprised if it fails - this failure gets you one step closer to success. Later on, focus on sticking to your values. Integrity is so important. As soon as you lose what you believe in a lot of other things tend to slip too.

What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?

Don’t waste your energy on things you cannot do anything about or cannot control.